In contrast, environmental specialists employed by two other United Nations specialized agencies, the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, have developed a widely-cited assessment that at least 51 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas is attributable to livestock. I’m one of those specialists.

One might expect the FAO to work objectively to determine whether the true figure is closer to 18 percent or 51 percent. Instead, Frank Mitloehner, known for his claim that 18 percent is much too high a figure to use in the U.S., was announced last week as the chair of a new partnership between the meat industry and FAO.

FAO’s new partners include the International Meat Secretariat and International Dairy Federation. Their stated objective is to “assess the environmental performance of the livestock sector” and “to improve that performance,” starting with a three-year project to establish “methods and guidelines.”

The new partnership assumes that meat production worldwide will “more than double” from 1999 to 2050. But the International Food Policy Research Institute has set out a scenario by which meat production will decline at least through 2030. Climate authorities like Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the seminal Stern Review on the economics of climate change, and Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair, have even recommended vegetarian diets to reverse climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

FAO’s new activity isn’t entirely a surprise, as its livestock specialists have elsewhere acted to reverse a common perception that a prescription for less livestock was built into their report “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” For example, its lead author and a co-author later wrote to prescribe more factory farming, not less, and no limit on meat.

Yet “Livestock’s Long Shadow” may not be uniformly endorsed by the whole FAO, as it invited Jeff Anhang and me to present our analysis first at FAO headquarters in Rome, then in Berlin.

FAO’s basic purpose is to “promote the common welfare” in a “neutral forum.” However, FAO’s new partnership includes only four wealthy countries, and no poor country. Yet the former director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which normally promotes livestock, expressed concern about the impacts of industrially-produced meat on the poor – saying that “factory-farmed” livestock eat grains “that might instead have fed people.”

Factory farming was criticized even by a co-author of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” Cornelius De Haan, when he was lead author of the World Bank’s 2001 livestock strategy. That strategy pegged livestock’s adverse impacts at a lower level than in the 2006 “Livestock’s Long Shadow” — yet the World Bank strategy recommends that institutions should “avoid funding large-scale commercial, grain-fed feedlot systems and industrial milk, pork, and poultry production.”

A new ILRI strategy concludes that “livestock is back on the global agenda,” and that increased productivity must come from “intensified” systems. A videotape reveals a push for research to support ILRI’s predetermined conclusions, as the new director general states: “How do we elevate the livestock game?…In the past we have not looked so much at the issue of food consumption in urban areas…A good bit of the negative criticism of livestock is its contribution to greenhouse gases and its very high environmental footprint – so we must develop stronger research responses to these challenges.”

Evidence shows that ILRI may fear public acceptance of our widely cited assessment that livestock are responsible for at least 51 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas. ILRI was sufficiently concerned about acceptance of the 51 percent figure that it raised the issue with its annual meeting’s participants before, during, and after its 2010 meeting – and found that acceptance of the 51 percent figure by the meeting’s participants actually rose from about 1.5 percent before the meeting to about 7.5 percent after the meeting.

Yet “Livestock’s Long Shadow” apparently undercounted by a large margin the amount of land used for livestock and feed production – estimating it at 30 percent of all land on earth, while ILRI has estimated it at 45 percent. Other gaps in “Livestock’s Long Shadow” may have occurred because it was authored by livestock specialists – while international good practice in environmental assessment is to have projects with major environmental impacts (such as global livestock and feed production) be assessed by environmental assessment specialists.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture OrganizationA state of the art lagoon waste management system for a 900-head hog farm, completely automated and temperature-controlled. United States, 2002.

The key difference between the 18 percent and 51 percent figures is that the latter accounts for how exponential growth in livestock production (now more than 60 billion land animals per year), accompanied by large scale deforestation and forest-burning, have caused a dramatic decline in the earth’s photosynthetic capacity, along with large and accelerating increases in volatilization of soil carbon.

Agriculture is outdoors to a unique degree, exposing it to greater risk from emissions attributable to livestock than any other industry’s risk from the same emissions. So food industry leaders have a compelling commercial incentive to reduce these emissions.

While the FAO and ILRI argue that millions of poor people have no alternative to raising livestock for their livelihoods, tens of millions of poor people’s livestock have died in the past few years because of climate disasters. Replacing them would risk a similar fate for the new animals.

Conversely, replacing at least a quarter of today’s livestock products with better alternatives would both reduce emissions and allow forest to regenerate on a vast amount of land, which could then absorb excess atmospheric carbon to reduce it to a safe level. This may be the only pragmatic way to reverse climate change in the next five years as needed. Sufficient renewable energy infrastructure is projected to take at least 20 years and $18 trillion to develop.

Substitutes for livestock products require no subsidies or offsets. Consumers can buy more of them tomorrow.

About

Mark Bittman writes (mostly) about food for the Times Opinion pages, and is The Magazine’s lead food columnist. He is the author of “VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00” and “How To Cook Everything”. His Web site is markbittman.com.